alright, let's talk about tiktok, since that's what yesterday's main NYT story was about. still too tired to go through screenshotting it piece by piece, but i have enough to say regardless.
tiktok is a threat to national security, but it's also a threat to public health. i would like to see politicians arguing more for the latter than the former, but at the same time we don't have a great track record of banning things that are bad for us.
i don't like tiktok. i don't have a tiktok account, i avoid it wherever possible. i feel like tiktok has destroyed so much, and it's all at the behest of a country that does NOT have our best interests in mind. i'm not going to give a chinese authoritarian algorithm control over my dopamine receptors.
tiktok destroyed our attention spans. gen alpha can't focus on anything longer than 15 seconds anymore. longform social platforms have upended their formats to try and imitate tiktok. i don't want reddit to look like tiktok, i don't want youtube to work like tiktok!
and on top of the ADHD-brain bite-sized content format, it's promoting an addiction to endless scrolling. i used to be able to open up my sm of choice, read whatever had been posted since the last time i looked at it, and be done.
@dietotaku look at modern pop music as opposed to 1960s. pop songs are under 3 minutes. songs from the 60s were often over 10
@dietotaku i just don't listen to pop. the misogyny drives me crazy
@dietotaku Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida 17.03 it got a lot of airplay. i'm less interested in where/if something charts
@redenigma okay but you see how that's the exception, not the rule? and probably the result of recording on LSD trips rather than the general population's attention span. but there is something to be said for the effect on mental health when the predominant media consumption only comes in 15-second clips.
@dietotaku if it's longer than 15 seconds, it interrupts the commercials...
@dietotaku maybe that's why it's so hard to find a classical music station now... the songs are too long.
@redenigma (i am not as angry as the gif makes me appear, just pointing out that neither claim about song length is true)